So I finally had the bling to pick up 70-200 2.8 VR lens. I rented this lens on a trip to Europe in February and totally fell in love. Plus, now I have lenses covering everything from 12mm to 200mm. A 1.7 or 2 teleconverter may be in my future, but I think I'd replace my 18-70 first. Either one is a ways off though, as the ol' photo bank account just hit zero with this purchase. Anyway, I'll be posting photos taken with this beauty soon.
First off, let me credit David over at www.strobist.com for the lighting ideas (homemade snoot anyone?) that allowed me to capture this shot yesterday. A little about the setup - Nikon D200 with my SB-600 off-camera, fired via Nikon's CLS. The duct tape looking thingy is my homemade cereal box snoot, which allows me to direct the flash output more precisely than otherwise. I zoomed the flash to 85mm and covered with is 1/2 CTO (color temperature orange) gel which gave me the nice warm color on the baseball. There's not much else to it, post-processing was minimal, just a touch of high pass sharpening and the image was complete.